Mostly Pessimistic Thoughts

Sometimes I catch myself reminiscing over little snippets of my New York trip. I've not glamorized it so much yet that I don't remember all the angst and frustration - remember how I hated it, even? - but there are moments and emotions that I still look back on fondly. I remember laying in my top bunk with the breeze blowing against my back from my bay window, and I remember a mixed feeling of helplessness and independence. That's a strong emotion. It's beautiful and tragic all at once, when you feel both like you're accomplishing something amazing but also as though you're right on the verge of being in way over your head. I think that's an emotion that I experience regularly right now. I'm happy, I'm thrilled that things are going the way they are, but I feel as if I'm far too close to the deep end.

This U.S. history class has really shaken my worldview. The awful, atrocious things that America has done absolutely blows my mind. Not even the slavery, the exploitation of women and children, the lynchings and prejudice that lasted well into the 20th century (which seems as if it should have been the pinnacle of modernity). Things like the way we gained Hawaii, for instance. The U.S. government basically set into motion a series of events that they knew would lead to a revolt, and American sugar planters took over the government from the Hawaiian queen. Even some of Teddy Roosevelt's political moves just shock me - I was aware of a lot of the awful things that America has done over the years, but apparently that was just the tip of the iceberg.

It's not fair to say that without a nod towards some of the awful things that humanity as an entity has enacted on each other. It's nothing unique to Americans, it's unique to humanity itself. There's an innate kind of cruelty specific to people that even our closest evolutionary relatives don't have. Animals may eat their young, but it's with none of the same malice that the Spaniards tortured people with during the Inquisition. It's disheartening, really.

I have just the most amazing friends and family. In all seriousness, I can't imagine how I would make it without them. Last night, my sister and Casey hauled most of my belongings from my apartment to the new house. Troopers, the both of them, and all I did in return was give them some chocolatey non-coffee. I wish I could really express my thanks in some more meaningful way, other than just to say that I cannot imagine a life without the kind of people that I've been lucky enough to become close with.

I need to start thinking of "Brian's place" as "our place." That's going to be a shift. I'm four days away from having no other place to go, but I still just keep thinking of it as "his place." That's crappy from a personal standpoint, but I also need to learn to take ownership of it just so I can feel like I have something of my own.

More General Frustrations

I have one of the most pointless, frustrating jobs I've ever imagined. On the few days when I feel some sense of accomplishment or fulfillment, more often than not I'm told that, although I did something correctly, I need to do it again a different way for boss number three. And then halfway through that, I need to do it a third way for boss number four. I've worked places where the communication was heinous - nonexistent - but this more or less trumps them all. I'm all tied up by red tape, and anytime I do anything at all, I'm constantly afraid that someone else in a higher position than me is going to demand that I do it again, differently.

Bureaucracy and politics may, in fact, be the root of all evil. Not even state and federal politics (that one's a given), but just interpersonal politics that make all kinds of little things difficult. Or maybe my world is just too small - that's entirely possible. When all of the important people in your life know each other as closely as you know them, or closer, you're stuck in situations where you know more about each of those people than you want to know, and your role in the middle essentially boils down to "damned if you do, damned if you don't." I can't make everyone happy in this situation, and the real problem is that it's my fault for allowing myself to slip in the middle. Stupid, stupid.

My commitment - no, that's not the right word. My drive tends to waver or fade depending on certain circumstances. Being sick for so long certainly didn't help. I got sick, am still a little sick, and can't focus on anything simple for very long, much less Foucault and Freud through a feminist theory lens. Also the aforementioned situation leaves me feeling . . . an aversion. When I'm disillusioned by something (an easy task, as I'm sure is evident by this point), I feel far less desire to get things done. That's such a character flaw. I need to find my own drive and stop relying on others'.

This thesis is starting to really overwhelm me. I was sent back some revisions today, and although I'd totally expected an entire wall of blue to take over my three pages of notes, there were questions on there that, as far as I know, have no answers. Here's an example: "And this he means neurophysiologically, yes? In which case, you think of it in terms of the performative (a la Butler)." Oy. Butler confuses me, neurophysiology confuses me, and performativity (although Brian is currently ensconced in its grasp) confuses me. I'm learning, and so help me I'll have all of this at least tenuously in my head by tomorrow, but it's a brutal realization when your thesis no longer makes any sense to you.

Moving Woes

I get bizarrely melancholy whenever I move. It doesn't matter if I'm moving somewhere better (which I clearly am) or whether the circumstances are sort of forcing me into it - the fact that I'm ending a chapter of my life, and beginning another chapter, breaks a little piece of my heart. I know it makes no sense, but once I've become used to the circumstances I'm in, the idea of changing them goes against everything in me. Maybe each apartment is an incarnation of me - a little part of me that I'm leaving behind. Or maybe each of my apartments have been a manifestation of my personality, so moving out feels like a slow deconstruction. Whether or not I can put my finger on it, the melancholy, the reminiscence still looms large whenever I start putting belongings in boxes.

I think I'm going to change this blog around, and hopefully can start channeling some of my terror towards this (more constructive) venue. First of all, clearly I don't live in Brooklyn anymore. So I think it's important to label more what it is - "Theories on Life of a Soon-To-Be College Graduate," or something to that effect. All of my life that isn't concerned with finishing my thesis and keeping a half-step ahead of my classes is now concerned with figuring out how to cope with the crushing weight of my future. And those are just on days when I'm not constantly asking myself "why did I choose this major? Why am I not in the business school? What possessed me to go into the arts?"

Taking a break from the complaining for a moment, I'd like to mention that Brian has been so incredibly supportive through all of this. I know by this point he has little desire to talk through all of my life issues - that do pertain to him, but that don't get a lot easier even when you agonize over them - but every time I want to talk it over, he's game for it. He's told me that it's not over if I move, but that if I want to go somewhere else I could, and should. He's told me that if I want to go to grad school in another state, he'd have no problem going with me so long as that school had a decent rhetoric program. I don't know what I did to deserve him - no, actually, I know I never could have done anything great enough to deserve him - but I'm so intensely grateful for the crazy set of coincidences that led us to each other. I hope I'm half as good to him as he is to me.

Oh Sarah. Congratulations, dear one, on getting into your top school. I am so very happy for you - you deserve everything good that's about to come your way. Thank you for always listening when I'm frustrated or scared, for always supporting my crazy ideas (encouraging certain TA-baiting ones), for always being a great friend. I know what you're going through, all the anxiety that comes from moving to a brand new city, and I hope I can help you through it as much as you helped me, although I know you won't need it.

Where does a film studies major even start to find a job?

What if I'm beautiful and I'm intelligent, but I'm neurotic as hell and no one will ever be able to truly accept my crazy? What if people can project whatever they want to on me, and they see the awesome girl that they want when in fact I'm just as ugly and frustrating as any other girl on the inside? What if I find myself in my underwear obsessively cleaning my house and trying not to look in the mirrors because I'm suddenly unhappy with my body? What if I lose the best thing in my life because every now and then, inexplicably, I have to really work not to randomly cry? There's a distinct terror in not knowing whether you're normal or not.

Heidi gave me the most brilliant, perfect way to make my senior thesis interesting again. I can't even tell you how much of a weight that is off my mind. It also gives me an opportunity to do something that is somewhat unheard of in arts programs - debut a failed project. Basically what she wants me to do is to use the video I shot in New York in conjunction with the blogs that I wrote on the same days, and if possible, the texts from those days as well. I show essentially how the video failed me, and that for my purposes in my particular time, text was the better medium. While it is in fact undoing a lot of the things that Brian's working to do in his PhD program, it really makes my project not only more interesting to me, but more original in general. It's such the better plan - I'm quite excited now.

Chainsaw noises behind my house again. There are nights when I'm none too comfortable coming home to my little ghetto apartment in crackhead-land.

I think sometimes it's incredibly obvious when I've been splitting up my blogs - when one part was begun one night and the next part was written the next day. Some of this is intensely personal, and sometimes I think I shouldn't post it.

Musings Over a Few Days

Check out this quote by Michel Foucault (my new forced philosopher of choice):

"My problem is essentially the definition of the implicit systems in which we find ourselves prisoners; what I would like to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice without knowing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent. Therefore, the more I travel, the more I remove myself from my natural and habitual centers of gravity, the greater the chance of my grasping the foundations I am obliviously standing on. To that extent any trip - not of course in the sense of a sightseeing trip nor even a survey - any movement away from my original frame of reference, is fruitful."

This is an incredible, succinct explanation to why the distance, the chaos of New York was so inspiring for writing. I was everyday forced to examine those ideologies and assumptions that I stand on - that we all stand on, differently - because it was so far removed from my normal, even from the circumstances and situations that *built* my ideologies and assumptions. It's really an incredible quote, and the more I look at it, the more I realize why the inspiration, the wonder that was New York completely faded when I came back here. Honestly, it's bizarre how quickly I fell back into South Carolina. Rapidly, mercilessly, like I hadn't missed a beat. Maybe for a split second my ideologies were challenged by familiar sights after an unfamiliar period of time, but it was incredibly brief. I was already back in my South Carolina mindset by the time I'd spent my first night back.

There's nothing quite as wonderful as having someone to believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

So it's pet peeve time. If this blog were called "Rachel's Pet Peeve of the Day," it would much more easily be a daily post. I know a lot of you love me maybe not for my snark, but at least along with my snark, so here goes: entitled people. Entitled people irritate me to no end. I hope to God that when it's all said and done, people can say that I was at least thankful for all the things I was given. I don't deny that I've been given many things in my life, but I dearly hope that I've expressed my gratefulness for them in most of those cases. Here's the thing, though - don't walk into my coffee shop thinking that my only purpose in this world is to serve you. Don't come in with daddy's credit card, run up a twenty dollar bill, and the conveniently forget to tip. Or even just look up from your cell phone for a second, make eye contact with me, and thank me for the time I've taken to make you that fancy coffee drink that you think you need. Courtesy, people. It's not that difficult. Throw me a bone.

School . . . Future . . . Eww

I find that professors are often the only people smart enough to know when I really think they're stupid. Thus I've never been popular with the professors that I was not impressed with intellectually - Elizabeth Hoffman is a good example (yep, we're naming names). Oddly enough, my fellow students can rarely tell when I think they're absolutely idiotic, but the professors always seem to have a fairly good sense of when I can't stand them. I think many things about me can be falsified, but my eyes don't lie. When I hate you, you know. That's part of the reason why I didn't break the A in my last history class - my TA was, legitimately, an idiot, and she could tell that I knew it. The first day of class she asks, "what can maps tell us?" And I wanted to break out my Benedict Anderson film theory and show her the what-for. She then proceeded to grade all my papers harshly because she didn't like me. Swear to God.

There are days when I feel - intensely - like I'm riding on the coattails of much greater and more talented people. Brian's the obvious example. The next three or four years for me will be both an opportunity to distinguish myself from the excellent company I keep, but also to deserve that company. At the moment, I'm fairly certain I've just stumbled into it. I'd like to earn it. What happens come April will fairly well decide the course of the next few years, and while I'm a little depressed that those glad tidings won't be coming for me, I'm still happy that I have some semblance of a plan. Although that plan reads "follow Brian to _____" at the moment.

I had a short discussion with him about it about a week ago - I told him that it's comforting for me to be able to rest on what he's going to do, in some odd way. If he goes to India, I'm given a circumstance like New York, but more intense and hopefully more inspiring. I don't know if I'll flourish or languish there, but either way I'll have done something intensely new. That's so much pressure to put on him, though. I'm asking him to support me (emotionally, less so monetarily), and be comfortable with the idea of me following him wherever the next few years take him. I hope against all odds that I'll find some way to create my own good luck, but for me, having any semblance of a plan helps.

Senioritis has certainly struck. I'm making it - for the most part - and in fact got my first A on a film paper since taking exclusively Susan Courtney film classes. I was ecstatic, for the record. I'm making better grades this semester than last - at least so far - but I just find myself having to force myself to try a little more than last time. Last semester was my shining beacon, but I guess I've said that more than once.

So that was my school/future bitching session. Expect one on work in the near future. Maybe tomorrow night.

I've started probably ten blogs in the last month - since the last one I wrote? - and ended up dropping all of them. Now that I'm here, my topics are about things and people here. Often Brian, but most of the time I discard those because I think he'd blush over the adoring way I write about him, and I'd probably blush over allowing anyone to know the lovestruck way I think about him. I've started a few about school, but this semester just hasn't been inspiring in any actual scholastic ways. I've thought about writing some about the Film Archive, but most of what inspires me there are the old film reels that I bring home and attach to my walls. I don't know if I should be worried because I'm stagnating, but I think I'm going to try to head that off before it begins. More on that later.

The city that you live in is always bigger than you think it is. More layers, more niches, more places to go that you didn't know existed - partially because, once you're in a place long enough, you forget to really look around you. Everything in life is like that to some extent, I think. You live anywhere, see anything, do anything long enough, and it becomes such second nature that you forget to pay attention to it. I feel like part of living life "fully" (if you'll forgive me using such a cliched term) is learning to periodically delve back into the simple, mundane functions that make up our lives. Part of that, for me, is just walking through a neighborhood that I most often drive through. Walking and driving are so fundamentally different to start with. When you're driving, you're watching traffic patterns and stoplights and thinking about fast ways to get where you're going. When you're walking, even walking with a destination in mind, you see the buildings and notice what's in them and study all the ins and outs of the area around you. Even having to be aware of potentially dangerous situations is intrinsically different from the way you interact with your surroundings in a car. This particularly intrigued me today walking around Brian's neighborhood, noticing how few buildings on Devine I really know the purpose of - there are office buildings, residential areas, and shops on the side of Devine that I had only assumed was . . . actually, I'd never even really considered it. Case in point.

I'm bad about stagnating. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I've always had significant problems staying interested in . . . anything, really, without sustained stimulation. I can't say it's exactly intellectual, but there's something that I sometimes find lacking - most especially during the summer - that destroys my ability to function well. Maybe it's senioritis, or maybe this semester really is just lacking in some way, but I need something to yank me out of this weird haze that I'm in. I'm incredibly happy, but after last semester, when I was interested and engaged in school, this semester's a little bit frustrating. I've been presented with what might be an opportunity to break free of that, as long as I have the nerve to go ahead with it. But even so, contacting the person you pretty much worship in order to ask for some kind of mentor relationship is pretty daunting.

Anyway. Let's hope I can keep writing some.